


sir, this is my emotional support clown (and my emotional support goth)

by oncewewerezombies



Series: Diamonds and Clubs Month [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - Human/Troll Society (Homestuck), Alternate Universe - No Sburb/Sgrub Sessions, Anxiety, Bigotry & Prejudice, F/M, M/M, Other, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Past Relationship(s), Purple Prose, References to Canon, Workplace, corporate culture, retail is hell, self-deprecation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-26
Updated: 2019-09-26
Packaged: 2020-10-30 22:44:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20781311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oncewewerezombies/pseuds/oncewewerezombies
Summary: Eridan is called on the carpet for failing to smile for customers.





	sir, this is my emotional support clown (and my emotional support goth)

**Author's Note:**

> 3\. [Musical theme ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ)

You resist the urge to fidget and stare down the suit from corporate they've sent along to; what, you don't know exactly. You can't think of a fuckin thing you've done to deserve this. The cramped back office is where Gamzee usually spaces out in between customers jonesing hard for caffeine, and there's a lingering smell of weed that you're pretty sure by now is embedded into the cushions of the office chairs. Nobody knows exactly where they come from; sometimes you just come in here to check the schedule or tell Gamzee that a customer wants to speak to a manager, and there's a new one crammed in with the rest or some are gone and there's a new one in their place. It's a constant mystery and if you ask Gamzee what the fuck is going on with the chairs, he says the same thing he always fuckin does when he doesn't want to answer a question.

Miracles, bro.

Miracles are as much bullshit as magic. It's not like any of you are six sweeps anymore. It's fucking bullshit, but getting Gamzee to relinquish hold of miracles as a force active in the world would be like expecting the laws of physics to stop working. Besides, they make him happy. You guess.

Your fingers twist over each other despite what you're thinking to yourself about not fidgeting, and you rub the plating of the heavy steel ring that you've got on your thumb. You have to take off most a the ones you usually wear for work, but if Sharon from Illinois (god, you can hear her whinnying laugh in your head, you're so glad you barely have any shifts with her now) can wear her wedding ring, then you can wear this one and only ring, right. What the fuck is this about, anyway? This shithead still hasn't gotten to the fucking point -

"...concerned about recent feedback from customers," the suit finally murmurs out, and you keep your fin-flare down to just a quick flick, as opposed to what your emotional instinct is to flare 'em wide in aggression. No reason to make him think worse of you than he already does. "...regarding your...behaviour. At the counter."

"I got a right to have one person here, don't I?" you say to the suit, since you think you've finally figured out what is going on here and you're so fucking mad that you feel your fingers itch for moulded plastic and rubber. You try to keep calm, but you'd swear you can feel the orange-red of rage rising up into your eyes like sunset light spreading out over the sea. That blueblooded _bastard_ \- with his fucking _bowtie_ and stupid fucking _horns_ to match - you can't think of anyone else who might have made sure you wound up here. Someone you'd been 'rude' to, and was just fuckin petty enough to complain _enough_ that this was the fucking result. "A support person. It's in the employee handbook."

The suit looks like you slugged him in the gut. Fucking human. What, does he think you don't know how to read or somethin? He looks so fucking surprised. You feel your lip twitch, wanting to sneer and you hold it in ruthlessly. There's a lot of changes you've had to made to the way you act so you can keep your job. You're fuckin proud, but not so proud that you wanna starve. 

"...yes," the suit says doubtfully, like he thinks you're going to back down if he's scathing enough in his inflection. Joke's on him, you're dead inside in the way that only hospitality and the service industry can induce through overloaded exposure to the public at large, in all their fuckin mouthbreathing glory. Every day. All day. He ain't a speck to what you usually go through, he ain't. Hasn't even sworn at you yet, or thrown somethin. Piece a cake. You can feel your leg ache to jitter anyway, and you squash the urge ruthlessly. You still can't get a grip of what your hands are doing, guess you need to get it out somehow. This terrible burning anxiety. You can feel yourself going stiller, colder, haughtier and you can see the human reacting to it. On Alternia, something like you would have eaten something like him, served sliced on toasted pieces of grain-substrate. Yet here you fucking are; you don't know exactly which troll in your lineage decided to escape the Empire by joining the refugee boats but this is what you're fucking reduced to.

Sometimes you dream about being stronger, better. Being feared. You dream of murder, of hunting something besides paper targets. You dream of flying. You dream of something bigger, better than the Winchester you'd saved for months to own. Something that flares with blue light, and hums in your ear instead of going _crack_ with the sound of the bullet.

You haven't missed a bull's-eye since the six month mark of when you started shooting.

You've never held a rifle like the one you dream of.

"Do you have someone in mind," the corporate drone in front of you says, like he's sure you don't fuckin have anyone to ask. Someone like you. A troll. A seadweller. You open your mouth, about to ask for - your thinking stutters, not sure who to ask for, all of a sudden. Before you can get a syllable out (you can feel your wigglerhood stutter lurking, getting ready to trip you up and it freezes the words in your throat for a crucial moment) - the door opens. And two people almost fall in through the newly vacated space, tripping over each other in their haste to enter.

Your earfins flare despite yourself, and something warm spreads through your guts (they _came_ for you).

"As his manager -" Gamzee says loudly, and Rose scoffs delicately next to him before she elbows him in the gut and makes her way to the stained chair next to you. Seats herself as delicately as a cat curling its tail around its paws, fluffing out her skirt and crossing her feet at the ankles. "As his manager, I'm gonna be sitting this one in. You gonna be in here, making trouble for my motherfucking staff, then you know I gotta be here, bro."

"And I'm here as his support person," Rose interjects as the suit flounders for a moment, effectively cutting him off at the pass before he can object to her presence. She smiles, showing not a hint of teeth behind the black lipstick of her smile but it's full of fangs all the same. "_And_ his union representative."

The suit looks fucking sick, gone all pale under the peach of his skin. You can't say you feel sorry for a walking wastechute sphincter the way someone the likes of him so obviously is. It gives you a chance to appreciate how the tables have fucking turned, and you can't say you're not enjoying it. Not if you're gonna be truthful.

"Wwait, I joined the union?" you mutter to her, turning your head slightly to try and keep the conversation between the two of you. The way the corporate drone is staring at Gamzee in horror as the long-limbed purpleblood folds himself into one of the chairs inside the cramped office space out the back of the cafe, making it even smaller somehow by his mere presence, you don't think he heard you. Honest to God, you don't know what the drone is worried about. Gam ain't even wearing his fucking paint, he looks like any other troll asshole on the streets. Maybe a little bigger than most, you guess, but not something that a human shouldn't be used to. Maybe they don't have trolls at headquarters (you wouldn't actually be fuckin surprised, bigoted pieces a shit).

"You let me manage your finances remember," she murmurs back, the corner of her mouth tipped up in a way that says that someone here is going to be ripped to fucking shreds. You know it ain't gonna be you, and you're looking forward to it. "You're a member of good standing, all your fees paid up."

She's always out there looking out for those small details, shit you miss sometimes. Stuff Gamzee never even thinks about, you're sure of that. You think about it, but sometimes you get distracted from dealing with it.

"Thanks," you sigh out, and lean back into your chair. What you got now ain't any kind of conventional, but you tried that. You did traditional. It didn't fucking suit you. You and Gams, both, you're coming off the tail-end of wigglerhood moirallegiances that you'd always thought would last forever. Yours had turned far more fucking toxic at the end than his, but the conclusion was mostly the same. Hadn't been yours or Fef's fault, hadn't been Gamzee's or Kar's. People moved on, people changed. It happened.

Rose had been a fucking surprise. 

Not that you could say that you expected to find yourself in any sort of quadrant with a human, but she'd taken surprisingly well to the whole idea of moirallegiance. Like a quackbeast to sunny waters...maybe more like a blacktip shark to an enclosed lagoon. If you're gonna be accurate with your metaphors. She loves to get her sticky agile fingers into both yours and Makara's thinkpans, give them a twirl. Somehow the two of you wind up more stable at the end of it, you don't know how. And you both keep her trucking along without taking herself too seriously, not letting her take too much on (or drink too much). Maybe two people in a moirallegiance with substance abuse problems would be too much, but between the three of you, you manage Gamzee and her both (and she manages you and him, and he manages the both of you in his own way). Between the three of you, you manage to be a fucking responsible, functioning person. You're still not sure how, but you're not gonna argue with it. If it works, it works, and you're pretty fucking pragmatic at the end of it all.

"Right, so run us all through from the motherfucking top, bro," Gamzee says with glacial yet threatening calm, and Rose pulls out a pen and a notebook. The sound of the pen clicking as she pushes the nib out echoes in the suddenly silent room, and the suit looks like he's sweating in his cut-price, off the fucking rack navy-blue monstrosity. You feel a lot more calm all of a sudden, with your two moirails on either side a ya, and not so fucking cornered. "Love to fuckin' know what kinda problem you got with one of my top performers..."

On your thumb, the steel ring is heavy. On the inside, the names of all three of you follow each other across the length of the band. Maybe you'd forgotten for a moment that you ain't alone any more, but they're always here to remind you. You got people to lean on, people you can count on - you're not alone. Feeling that spark of hope bouying you up, you turn your attention back to this meeting that was meant to dress you down, and get ready to fight your way through this bullshit and out the other side. Without Rose and Gamzee, maybe you'd have turned belly-up, but it's different when someone believes in you. People who ain't gonna let you down, or split when things get tough.

And you? You got lucky enough to have two.


End file.
